Oct. 16, 2010 - Federal officials acknowledged Saturday that David Coleman Headley, the U.S. businessman who confessed to being a terrorist scout in the 2008 Mumbai attacks, was working as a DEA informant while he was training with terrorists in Pakistan.

Federal officials, who spoke only only on background because of the sensitivity of the Headley case, also said they suspect a link between Headley and the al Qaeda figures whose activities have sparked recent terror threats against Europe.

The revelations came after a report Friday [1] by ProPublica and the Washington Post that the FBI had been warned about Headley’s terrorist ties three years before the Mumbai attacks. Headley wasn’t arrested until 11 months after the attack. {read rest}

Europeans aren't. European intelligence agencies and governments denounced this piece of fraud of the U.S. very immediately, but I guess it takes a while for news to reach most Americans so they still believe the lying government, of the U.S. I think the Pakistani government also immediately or just as quickly denounced this false threat, but Europeans definitely did and this was very fast.

I posted links for one or more articles about that topic very recently here last week or the week before, but am not sure what article, here, the post was made for. But I just found a saved bookmark for the original article.

"Barack Obama accused of exaggerating terror threat for political gain"

A US terror alert issued this week about al-Qaida plots to attack targets in western Europe was politically motivated and not based on credible new information, senior Pakistani diplomats and European intelligence officials have told the Guardian.

The non-specific US warning, which despite its vagueness led Britain, France and other countries to raise their overseas terror alert levels, was an attempt to justify a recent escalation in US drone and helicopter attacks inside Pakistan that have "set the country on fire", said Wajid Shamsul Hasan, the high commissioner to Britain.

Hasan, a veteran diplomat who is close to Pakistan's president, suggested the Obama administration was playing politics with the terror threat before next month's mid-term congressional elections, in which the Republicans are expected to make big gains.

He also claimed President Obama was reacting to pressure to demonstrate that his Afghan war strategy and this year's troop surge, which are unpopular with the American public, were necessary.

"I will not deny the fact that there may be internal political dynamics, including the forthcoming mid-term American elections. If the Americans have definite information about terrorists and al-Qaida people, we should be provided [with] that and we could go after them ourselves," Hasan said.

"Such reports are a mixture of frustrations, ineptitude and lack of appreciation of ground realities. Any attempt to infringe the sovereignty of Pakistan would not bring about stability in Afghanistan, which is presumably the primary objective of the American and Nato forces."

Dismissing claims of a developed, co-ordinated plot aimed at Britain, France and Germany, European intelligence officials also pointed the finger at the US, and specifically at the White House. "To stitch together [the terror plot claims] in a seamless narrative is nonsensical," said one well-placed official.

While Abdul Jabbar, a Briton, and others killed by an American drone strike on 8 September in North Waziristan, in Pakistan's tribal areas, were heard discussing co-ordinated plots, including possible "commando-style" attacks on prominent buildings and tourist sites in European capitals, security and intelligence officials said the plots were nowhere near fruition.

The officials did not deny the men, and other foreign-born jihadi recruits who travel to the tribal areas for indoctrination and training, represented a potentially serious threat. "You have discussions about all sorts of things – that does not necessarily mean there is anything concrete. It is not easy to set up groups," said one counter-terrorism official.

By making it clear that the US drone strikes were pre-emptive, and were not in any way combating an imminent threat, European officials raised fresh questions – this time directly involving a British national – about the legality of the attacks, which could be viewed as assassinations.

They said Washington was the "driver" behind claims about a series of "commando-style" plots and that the CIA – perhaps because it was worried about provoking unwelcome attention to its drone strikes – was also extremely annoyed by the publicity given to them.

The plot claims, which western intelligence agencies were aware of for months, were leaked last week to the American media.

They were followed by a spate of what security and intelligence officials said were exaggerated claims in the British media, a US state department warning to American citizens to be vigilant when visiting Britain, France, and Germany, a "tit for tat" warning by France to its citizens visiting the UK, and alerts issued by the Swedish and Japanese governments.

Thomas de Maizière, Germany's interior minister, publicly expressed his scepticism about the US terror warning, saying he saw no sign of an imminent attack on Germany. He described the danger to Germany as "hypothetical".

(snip)

Hasan said Washington politicians failed to understand how much the US needed Pakistan in the "war on terror". Nor did they realise that public anger over repeated US infringements of Pakistani sovereignty could boil over into attacks on American personnel and interests that the government might not be able to control.

"The government does not want to go down this road," he said. "But people feel abused. If they [the Americans] kill someone again, they will react. There is a figure that there are 3,000 American personnel in Pakistan. They would be very easy targets."

(snip)

Thomas de Maizière refers to the so-called threat as "hypothetical". If we look at it that way, which we should, then Americans should understand. Hypothetical threats are the kinds of threats most Americans speak and write about most of the time. Every time someone writes about the wars putting U.S. national security in danger, so the U.S. itself, f.e., it's a hypothetical threat or danger, and isn't one I give much weight to or for; because I don't perceive that threat as very serious. What I do see for threat is not for what might be done to the U.S., but what might be done to U.S. forces in the war zones, as well as Americans working in American facilities or American-controlled facilities in countries where these Americans would be much more likely to become victims of the criminal and phony war on terrorism. If they were attacked by Afghan or Pakistani fighters, then they would be victims of this criminal and phony war far more than victims of resistance actions. The latter would only be the immediate and direct cause of the deaths, but it'd happened only because of this criminal and phony war on terrorism. So the latter would be the real cause of the deaths of American personnel hit by resistance fighters.

The same thing is true for foreign forces in Afghanistan being killed by resistance fighters. The real cause of these soldiers being killed is criminal, hegemon, lying, imperial, and so on, Washington and NATO Europe.

Anyway, this latest false alert from Washington about supposed terrorist threats against Europe is one in a long series of false terror alerts.

And there was an artile recently about Tom Ridge, who I think formerly was the Director of Homeland Security during the first and/or second terms of the Bush administration. He was exposing the false terror alerts that he had been pressured, by the White House, to issue; many times.

This article has all of the supporting or source links it could need and more; and I'll add some bold typefacing for emphasizing or highlighting a few parts of the quoted article.

When the city of Mumbai, India, was attacked by terrorists allegedly from the Lashkar-i- Taiba (LeT) group – a Muslim separatist organization fighting for independence for Kashmir from Indian occupiers – the CIA chief at the time, Gen. Michael Hayden, reportedly confronted his Pakistani counterpart, Lieutenant Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, and, according to Bob Woodward, said:

“’We’ve got to get to the bottom of this. This is a big deal.’ He urged Pasha to come clean and disclose all.”

With the revelation that David Coleman Headley, the “scout” who visited Mumbai and did reconnaissance work for LeT prior to the attack, was an informant for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), one might say pretty much the same thing to Hayden and his successor: come clean and disclose all.

According to a report published in ProPublica.org and the Washington Post:

“Three years before Pakistani terrorists struck Mumbai in 2008, federal agents in New York City investigated a tip that an American businessman was training in Pakistan with the group that later executed the attack.”

When Headley’s wife found out that he had another wife in Pakistan, she went to the FBI and reported his activities on behalf of LeT, his presence at Pakistani training camps, and his shopping for night vision goggles and other items that a terrorist might find handy. US government officials claim they investigated, but the accusations were too vague to be acted on. After being arrested as a result of the domestic dispute with his wife, he was freed, whereupon he roamed the world – Pakistan, India, New York, Chicago – meeting with terrorists while still claiming to be a DEA informant.

If ever there was a “terrorist” suspect whose bona fides stunk to high heaven, it was Headley. Born Daood Sayed Gilani, in Washington, D.C., the son of a prominent Pakistani broadcaster and an American mother from a wealthy Philadelphia family, he went to an elite military school in Pakistan. Upon his return to the US, at the age of 17, he married and soon became a heroin addict. He was arrested in 1988, and received a slap on the wrist for smuggling heroin in from Pakistan, getting a mere 4 years in prison while his partner in crime received 10. He was arrested again, in 1997, received a few months in prison, and emerged as a “prized DEA informant,” according to the official story.

Here is where it gets interesting: soon after his arrest and release, but while he was still on probation, he received permission to go to Pakistan to get married. As ProPublica puts it:

“Previously casual about his Muslim faith, he became radicalized. He sought out new recruits and raised funds for Lashkar and began preparing for its mountain training camps, getting corrective eye surgery and taking horse riding lessons, according to a person close to the case who requested anonymity.

“Gilani’s mix of extremism and Pakistani nationalism pushed him toward Lashkar, because of its popularity in Pakistan and its fight against India, anti-terror officials say. Although Lashkar is a longtime al Qaeda ally, it still functions largely unscathed in Pakistan, officials say.”

Let’s stop here and consider: how is it that someone who has been a heroin addict, and a DEA informant, who regularly travels to Pakistan on the US government’s dime, is all of a sudden “radicalized”? Here is someone who has lived in the United States as an adult for years, and works for the government, turning on a dime and becoming enamored with the cause of an obscure Muslim separatist group. It’s a murky picture made murkier by the comments of anonymous “anti-terror” officials, as reported in ProPublica:

“Court documents and interviews depict Headley, who is now 50, as a chameleon-like figure with a taste for risk and a talent for deception. Because of his sophistication and unusual profile, he was a valuable asset to police, spies, criminals and terrorists, officials say. ‘Headley’s a fascinating study,’ the U.S. anti-terror official said. ‘I see him as a mercenary, not ideologically driven. He’s not an Islamic terrorist in the classic sense.’”

So what happened to his “radicalization,” if he wasn’t “ideologically driven”? A mercenary is paid – but who was paying Gilani-Headley? According to him, as ProPublica reports, his paymaster was Uncle Sam:

“After the September 11 attacks, Gilani told associates that he planned to train with Lashkar as part of a secret mission for the U.S. government, [a] person close to the case said. ‘The FBI and DEA have joined forces and I am going to work for them,’ this person quoted him as saying. ‘I want to do something important in my life. I want to do something for my country.’”

Court records seem to verify he’s been doing exactly that since 2001: although scheduled to be released from probation in 2004, he was discharged early – in December 2001. The feds wasted no time in deploying him: “Within two months he was training in Pakistan with Lashkar, which had just been designated a terrorist organization by the United States and Pakistan, documents say.”

Mr. Headley, who changed his name just before his leap into terrorist activities, apparently had three wives – simultaneously – two of whom turned him in to US authorities. In 2005, his Moroccan wife went to the US embassy in Pakistan to report him for his association with LeT: she claimed he was planning a terrorist attack. US officials did nothing.

As the New York Times reports:

“In several interviews in her home, Mr. Headley’s Moroccan wife, Faiza Outalha, described the warnings she gave to American officials less than a year before gunmen attacked several popular tourist attractions in Mumbai. She claims she even showed the embassy officials a photo of Mr. Headley and herself in the Taj Mahal Hotel, where they stayed twice in April and May 2007. Hotel records confirm their stay.

“Ms. Outalha, 27, said that in two meetings with American officials at the United States Embassy in Islamabad, she told the authorities that her husband had many friends who were known members of Lashkar-e-Taiba. She said she told them that he was passionately anti-Indian, but that he traveled to India all the time for business deals that never seemed to amount to much.

“And she said she told them Mr. Headley assumed different identities: as a devout Muslim who went by the name Daood when he was in Pakistan, and as an American playboy named David, when he was in India.

“’I told them, he’s either a terrorist, or he’s working for you,’ she recalled saying to American officials at the United States Embassy in Islamabad. ‘Indirectly, they told me to get lost.’”

He’s either a terrorist, or he’s working for you. Here’s another possibility which you’ll pardon Ms. Outalha for not posing: he’s a terrorist and he’s working for us.

Two warnings from people close to him, and yet US officials do nothing while Headley-Gilani travels all over the world meeting with terrorists, free as a bird, with no visible source of income and plenty of help from various “friends.” The help he received, according to his court testimony, came from ex-officials of Pakistan’s spy agency – a group with longtime ties to the US military and intelligence agencies. Headley, we are told, is “cooperating” with authorities, but isn’t that what he’s always done?

The campaign to target Pakistan, and specifically Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency, as the real sponsor of the Mumbai attacks, and the shadowy force behind al-Qaeda, has picked up a lot of steam since President Obama took office. You’ll recall Obama directly threatened Pakistan even before he took office, during the campaign, and once in the White House has escalated attacks on Pakistani sovereignty that provoked a rebuke from Islamabad.

If the Headley case isn’t an attempted frame-up of the Pakistanis, then it is a very good imitation. The big problem for the US, however, is that Headley’s wives – who know where the bodies are buried – are talking.

As I write, India’s army of occupation in Kashmir – numbering some 700,000 – is murdering unarmed civilians, who are protesting in the streets because the Indian army is killing their sons. The ongoing “peace” talks have gotten nowhere, and were broken off by New Delhi in response to the Mumbai incident. The rise of Hindu ultra-nationalism, and the determination of the government to hold on to Muslim-majority Kashmir, have brought the long-simmering conflict between India and Pakistan to the boiling point. Having fought three wars, India and Pakistan are on the brink of fighting a fourth, with the former taking full advantage of US pressure on Islamabad to cement an alliance with Washington against their old enemies. Into this cauldron of bubbling tensions the Mumbai terror attack dropped like a packet of C-4 explosives.

In Obama’s Wars, Woodward relates an episode in which the former US ambassador to Afghanistan, and longtime neoconservative apparatchik Zalmay Khalilzad had a dinner discussion with Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari, in the course of which Zardari “dropped his diplomatic mask” and revealed his true beliefs about the terrorist attacks that are an everyday occurrence in his country:

“He suggested that one of two countries was arranging the attacks by the Pakistani Taliban inside his country: either India or the US. Zardari didn’t think India could be that clever, but the US could. [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai had told him the US was behind the attacks, confirming claims made by the Pakistani ISI.”

Woodward’s disdain is all too palpable: Khalilzad, he tells us, “listened calmly, even though the claims struck him as madness. The US was using the Taliban to topple the Pakistani government? Ridiculous. But Khalilzad knew Afghanistan’s President Karzai also believed in this conspiracy theory, more evidence that this region of the world and its leaders were dysfunctional.”

So “dysfunctional” that they have to be replaced with more competent – and compliant – sock-puppets. However, in light of the US government’s strong connection to Headley, perhaps Zardari and Karzai are a bit too functional for their own good.

Of course, any imputation of US wrongdoing can always be construed as a “conspiracy theory.” This is meant to divert attention away from the obvious question, which is: how and why was Headley-Gilani allowed to travel freely from Chicago to New York to training camps in the wilds of Pakistan, to Mumbai and other cities in India, all the while in the pay of the US government?

A known US spy turns up as an accomplice in the most dramatic and bloody terrorist attack since 9/11, and no one – not the US media, not a single member of Congress, not one prominent public figure – suspects there may be something to the Zardari-Karzai “conspiracy theory.” Is it something in the water, or are Americans so inured to the crimes of their government that they no longer care?

Now that is an excellent article and analysis.

Re. the part about Zalmay Khalilzad, the Pakistani President Zardari and Afghan President Karzai, see two articles in my second post, #2, in the following page. The two articles provide a lot more information.

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